Riddles in the Dark

The museum's climate control hummed, a perfect 68 degrees—unlike the sweating apartment Maya had fled three hours ago. She'd been running ever since Dan's text lit up her iPhone at 2 AM: *I think we need to talk about what happened.*

What happened. Passive voice for passive destruction.

Maya smoothed her hair, still damp from the shower she'd taken at the gym, the only place she could think to go. Her fingers found the gray strand at her temple—new, since January. Since everything started falling apart.

She stood before the Great Sphinx reproduction, fiberglass and paint masquerading as limestone. The original had watched empires rise and fall, had weathered millennia, while Maya couldn't survive three years of marriage. The Sphinx's missing nose seemed like a judgment.

The Great Pyramid cast long shadows across the gallery floor. A pyramid scheme, her father had called her marriage to Dan—nice on the outside, hollow on the inside, built on the labor of others. She'd laughed then. She wasn't laughing now.

Her iPhone vibrated again. Dan. Then her mother. Then Dan again.

The Sphinx posed its riddle to each traveler: What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening? Maya's riddle was simpler: How long do you keep running before you realize you're only running from yourself?

She touched the glass case containing a fragment of the real Sphinx's beard. Three thousand years old, and it had outlasted more marriages than Maya could count.

Her phone stopped vibrating. The silence was worse.

Maya sat on the bench beneath the pyramid's painted peak, closed her eyes, and finally stopped running.